Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: In The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between, Stacey D’Erasmo discusses how white space is used to establish intimacy. Gaps in the narrative, whether literal (as with a line or section break) or figurative (what is revealed by the speaker and what remains hidden), force readers to draw on their own personal experiences to make sense of the absence. In Alyse Knorr’s “Artifacts I,” white space serves many dual purposes that may, at first, seem contradictory. The gaps in each line force the reader to pause while also driving the narrative forward with each logical leap and accumulative action. Likewise, the blank spaces gesture toward chaos, and as the poem goes on, a concrete, organizational strategy. The speaker is bereft, and by the end of the poem, so too does the reader enter into this grief-stricken mindset.
Artifacts I
I wrote you the letter so you could tell
me how it’s wrong the iron gate
you never saw the plate I washed
that set you off my grandfather—
not grandmother—dead of a stroke
in your kitchen moving your bed
from room to room your desk in
and out of the closet you stop to sit
your dog every several paces and
he does I wrote you the rubric
and you changed one thing halfway
through the book halfway through
the halfway chapter weeping on
my unborn daughter’s floor coconut
scrubbed raw in my hair a buffalo
named J. P. my daughter named almost
the same as you the world felt larger
then you said the word world bereft
Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and coeditor of Switchback Books. She is the author of three poetry collections, three poetry chapbooks, and a nonfiction book. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others.
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